Generation something? By Jane Wright.

I was wondering if Zoe knew what I was feeling. She talked in great detail of Fenton’s passion for pasta and his 6 months living in Italy; she went on to order lasagne, fettuccini and spaghetti with meat sauce along with two bottles of Orvieto Classico. Without asking, Fenton ordered on my behalf the six-layer lasagne, two layers of ricotta cheese and roasted garlic, all topped with mozzarella cheese and covered with meat sauce. The waiter offered me another bottle of wine, it was really good wine. Since I had not eaten anything all day, the wine went straight to my head and soon I was feeling pretty good.

Whilst leaving the restaurant, somewhere near the East college station, Zoe staggers off to a club; I make my way towards the cemetery somewhere near Texas Avenue South to buy some pot. According to Fenton a cemetery is the ideal place for a drug deal.

A peaceful and visually pleasing atmosphere

I’m waiting for ‘Chad Towers’ an ex-employee of the Texas anti-drug task force. Allegedly back in the 80s he lead the task force that gained a bad name when it participated in the widely criticized drug raids in Tulia. He miraculously escaped a prison sentence for shooting two students in a confrontation during a pre-dawn raid. The first kid he shot had no class drugs but had a concealed weapon. Eventually he appears. He’s steely eyed & greasy looking. Don’t let his looks fool you; his father was a wealthy Wall Street playboy whose girlfriend, Lauren, dumped him after he lost his job to a recreational drug problem.

Feeling awkward I spark up a conversation.

”Have you any competition around here?”

Half stoned he replies:

”Gangs can be a problem, they battle back and forth over their neighbourhoods in an attempt to lay claim to larger and larger areas. A gang’s turf can be anything from a lousy alley behind a store to a graveyard. When they talk about controlling these areas, what they mean is controlling the narcotics sales in those areas.”

I thought a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ would suffice.

”Have I seen you around college?”

”I’m the campus drug dealer; I combine studies with the lucrative and at times dangerous job of supplying the vices of my fellow students, you see it’s a numbers game, the more street corners you control, the more transactions you can do. This results in turf wars, which are often the cause of drive-by shootings. Most of the guys you go up against somehow seem to get shot up to heck and back and they still survive, but the guy who drives around the street, sitting looking cool in his BMW gets hit by a stray round and that kills him. Luck of the draw I suppose.”

”So it’s all about luck, numbers and turf?”

”Yeah, luck, numbers and turf, at least 5 or 6 kids around here drink or buy some drugs on any given weekend. A number of their friends overdose on meth or ‘e’. A number of my top clients are those 18-year-old daddies’ girls on Valium, xanx, oxycontin and the classic methadone. Some kids can get a bit pushy.”

”What do you mean?”

”At any given moment they end up shooting at each other. I mean, one night I heard shots, then I heard one of them scream ‘I’ve been fucking it!’ so then of course I ran over and started immediately applying pressure.”

”So you tried to save a life.”

”Oh no! Not that kind of pressure, I told her she still owed me for some acid tabs, I helped myself to her purse and took what cash she had and threatened her for the extra $170. By one account, on that night 12 to 15 shots were fired. Fortunately only that one teen was hit. There were numerous eye witnesses to the shooting but they were all either armed or loaded up on crack, so you can understand why they didn’t volunteer any information.”

”So do you have people working for you?”

”Dealers can sell the drugs themselves, or they can hire local dealers and the carry out transactions on the main dealers’ street corners.”

”Who do you work for?”

”Fuck off man! I am the main dealer, people ask for my permission to sell on my corners, they come by every week and pay 70% of what they make. If they don’t like it or don’t pay well, we’d rough them up or clip ’em.”

”Why a grave yard?”

”I just like being in these weird, deathlike places, they’re kind of aesthetic looking and if in the event someone pulls a fast one, well, I’d simple ask where they’d like to be buried it pretty much freaks the fuck out of them.”

”Do you live around here?”

”I usually sleep in the car, I don’t sleep or eat all that well, now can we end this fucking interrogation? I mean, just because you know a few people I’m not telling you anymore shit.”

I’ve got my stash and heading towards the club. It’s one of those chic celebrity haunts, where gaining entrance requires at least an academy award nomination. Tonight it’s featuring a new band called Spastic Sound Wave a house/techno group.
I’m sat with some people who I vaguely know; some guy called Miles is talking to me.

”So it was only yesterday I heard that Sean spent the evening here at this club going on about his dead girlfriend. In the early hours of this morning, which is like today, he was rushed to Saint Georges Medical Centre, he was pronounced dead at 2.30am, I mean how fucking bad is that!”

He has this frozen traumatized look on his face, waiting for a reply.
I mumble something along the lines of “Yeah, that’s pretty fucked up.”

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